Art review: Karen Sargsyan at Ambach & Rice

Karen Sargsyan cuts and pastes paper with aplomb, virtuosity and humor. In the old days, that was the province of collage. Cubists, Dadaists and Surrealists employed collage to tear the veneer of normalcy off everyday perceptions. Times have changed, but Sargsyan does something similar in the digital phase of the Information Age.

Crafting three-dimensional figures that make Dr. Frankenstein’s monster seem quaint, even cuddly, the Armenia-born, Amsterdam-based artist draws visitors into a world where everything is fake and all the more frightening for it. The madness of modern life takes pointed shape in “Prisoners of Conscience,” Sargsyan’s first solo show in Los Angeles.

At Ambach & Rice, the larger of two galleries is jam-packed with small-, mid- and life-size figures, all made from paper. One strikes the pose of a haughty butler, his serving tray spilling tuxedo-clad elves. Another recalls the Wicked Witch of the East, her legs protruding from the gallery wall as if she just crashed through it.

Art review: Linda Stark 'Adorned Paintings' at Angles Gallery

Linda Stark’s paintings are not carved in stone. But they might as well be.

At Angles Gallery, the 10 paintings Stark has made over the last five years are as decisive as ancient icons that have been incrementally chipped, scratched and scraped into existence, every millimeter of their surfaces an anonymous record of total devotion and singular purpose. Likewise, each of Stark’s intensely distilled oils on canvas has the presence of a talisman from a lost civilization, its mysteriousness all the more charged for being a rare remnant of a time and place that has vanished and is on the verge of being forgotten forever.

Even more haunting is the sense that the civilization Stark’s paintings memorialize is ours. To look at her quietly harrowing works is to see the present from the future, long after our cherished ideals and humanistic impulses have died.

That’s a fantasy. And a dark one. But its reality is embodied in Stark’s one-of-a-kind works, which turn easy-to-read images (a belly button, a woman’s crotch, the palm of a hand) and familiar symbols (a peace sign, a valentine, a swastika) into enigmatic emblems.

You do not read Stark’s paintings, like signs or texts. The undulating contours of their slow-built surfaces transform abstract depictions into flesh-and-blood experiences — nothing more and nothing less than face-to-face confrontations between our best and worst selves.

-- David Pagel

Angles Gallery, 2754 La Cienega Blvd., (310) 396-5019, through Dec. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com.

Image: Detail of Linda Stark's “Stigmata” Credit: Brian Forrest, courtesy of Angles Gallery

Art review: Pae White's 'Here Today' at 1301PE

Pae White has just about perfected the blend of beauty and intelligence that has become her art’s trademark. At 1301PE, her new works are so pretty that you have to keep your wits about you if you want to understand them. Sophisticated misbehavior, or maintaining an impeccable sense of decorum while breaking the rules, is White’s modus operandi.

Manners and tastefulness appear to be the order of the day in White’s delicate works, which suffuse the domestically scaled gallery with an atmosphere of gentle intimacy. The largest work downstairs, “Ashen Roses, There,” floats like a snowflake. Six small wall-works, made of hand-painted, laser-carved, clay-covered panels, look good from a distance and even better close-up. If Larry Bell were a young woman, this is what he’d be making. (His show, of early mixed media works at Frank Lloyd Gallery, pairs powerfully with White’s.)

Upstairs, White’s works on painted paper, also burned with lasers, play positive and negative space off each other with great synergy. Overhead, hundreds of pieces, sculpted to resemble strings of super-sized popcorn, form a sweetly Surrealist drop ceiling.

In an adjoining gallery, White has hung a gorgeously woven tapestry so that it divides the space, like a big Minimalist sculpture. “Sea Beast” also functions like a photograph, depicting a macramé wall-hanging.

Although White is often credited with making works that blur the boundaries between art and design, “Here Today” suggests that it is more accurate to see her as a sharp-eyed formalist whose works wreak havoc on conventional distinctions between sculpture and drawing, art and craft, beauty and brains.

-- David Pagel

1301PE, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 938-6106, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.1301PE.com

Image: Pae White, "Ashen Roses, There," 2011, detail. Credit: 1301PE

Art review: "Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of Abstraction, 1950-1980" at Louis Stern Fine Arts

Over the last eight years, Karl Benjamin has had four solo shows in Los Angeles, two museum surveys in Southern California and two out-of-town exhibitions. His paintings have also been included in 36 group shows. That’s a busy schedule. It’s all the more remarkable because Benjamin has not made a painting since 1996, when the physical demands of his exacting abstractions exceeded his body’s capacity to meet them.

Even more impressive than the number of Benjamin’s exhibitions is the range and power of the paintings in them. At Louis Stern Fine Arts, “Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of Abstraction, 1950-1980” is exemplary. Filled with canvases never before exhibited and others you can’t get enough of, the sensational show traces a path through the 85-year-old’s oeuvre that is eye-opening, even to viewers who follow his work closely.

Part of that is due to Benjamin’s work ethic. For decades, he painted with purposefulness that bordered on recklessness, eagerly embarking on new bodies of work immediately upon completing old ones, which he squirreled away in a storeroom. Over the years, that storeroom became a treasure trove, which Benjamin’s recent exhibitions dig into.

Art review: Aaron Curry, Richard Hawkins at David Kordansky

At David Kordansky Gallery, Aaron Curry and Richard Hawkins have built a gallery-within-a-gallery. “Cornfabulation” is a work of art unto itself. It’s also many other things: a 3-D frame for 27 painted collages and nine collaged sculptures; a photographic backdrop for those same works; a stage on which visitors play out unscripted dramas; and the ground for individual flights of fancy, which take place in your imagination.

At its best, that’s what art does, even if it sounds corny. There’s nothing naive about Curry and Hawkins’ art, which has no illusions about life’s cruelties yet still makes room for dreaming.

Curry and Hawkins have covered the walls of their three-room museum with cardboard sheets they have silk-screened to resemble a cartoon version of the interior of a country bumpkin’s shack. The faux wood grain and nail heads drag the super-saturated palette of newfangled consumables into a world far away from life in the big city, where mom-and-pop shops have not yet been replaced by chain stores.

Their freestanding sculptures and wall-mounted collages are slapdash masterpieces that seem embarrassed by their own virtuosity. It is as if the artists want their pieces to disappear into the hyperactive camouflage of their DIY wallpaper.

But none is a wallflower. Each fails to fade into the background. This willful failure gives their loaded show the bittersweet twang of art that sticks in your memory.

-- David Pagel

David Kordansky Gallery, 3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., Unit A, (310) 558-3030, through Dec. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Image: Aaron Curry and Richard Hawkins, "Cornfabulation" installation view. David Kordansky Gallery

Art review: John Pearson 'Color Rise' at Sam Lee Gallery

Not every exhibition in Los Angeles is part of Pacific Standard Time, the Getty-sponsored extravaganza that features just about every kind of art made in Southern California from 1945 to 1980.

At Sam Lee Gallery, six human-size paintings by John Pearson are a breath of fresh air. Worlds away from the high-powered drive to turn art into history, the gentle weirdness and go-it-alone integrity of the 71-year-old, British-born, Ohio-based painter’s quirky works capture the atmosphere of the old days, when artists did their own thing and expected to be ignored for it.

Pearson’s paintings, on beveled, S-shaped canvases, coax loads of nuance from modest means. Each consists of two basic elements: sinuous stripes that run vertically and the outlines of geometric shapes, which appear to hover above the stripes. Rather than casting shadows, these circular, oval and elliptical components lighten the stripes behind them.

This simple shift downplays the drama of spectacular theatrics in favor of the modesty of see-for-yourself discoveries. Think Bridget Riley by way of Robert Mangold, Jim Isermann without the mind-bending discipline or Tim Bavington without a spray gun.

The pleasures of Pearson’s paintings in “Color Rise” have everything to do with the way he juxtaposes colors, mixing and matching precisely shaded grays, pinks, mints and olives to set up whispering rhythms punctuated by decisive silences.

— David Pagel

Sam Lee Gallery, 990 N. Hill St., No. 190, L.A. (323) 227-0275, through Oct. 29. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays. www.samleegallery.com

Image: John Pearson's "Oscillation/Fluctuation Series #18," 2011. Credit: Sam Lee Gallery

Art review: Robert Therrien at Gagosian Gallery

Robert Therrien’s exhibition at Gagosian Gallery takes visitors into the artist’s studio — not literally, by re-creating its architectural details, but by inviting us to go there in our imaginations. This imaginative transport continues all the way into the artist’s head, where we witness ideas, inklings and intuitions being born, taking shape and resonating as they give birth to further visions, memories and sentiments.

In two large galleries, more than 75 long wood tables have been arranged to form a maze. Each of the workbench-style tables is covered with a sheet of thick paper, its buttery-yellowness warming the space.

Atop the paper, Therrien has laid out an impressive inventory of things: black-and-white Polaroids, pen-and-ink drawings, tools and templates, maquettes and mementos, souvenirs and studies, snapshots and sculptures.

Some of the sculptures are tiny: cast bronze snail shells, the silhouette of a country chapel. Most are small: a doll-size coffin, a streamlined oilcan. A few are big: a tower of giant plates, a life-size sidewalk and five beds, whose metal frames have been twisted into a spiral.

Too big for the tables, two sculptures stand alone. One, an exact copy of the corner of a dining room table, is tall enough for adults to walk under. The other, a stainless steel wire beard in a latticed shipping crate, recalls caged beasts from monster movies and children’s nightmares.

Therrien’s installation is a judicious mixture of finished pieces and the step-by-step processes that brought them into existence. It demystifies creativity without getting rid of the magic because it treats the artist’s studio as a down-to-earth workshop, a pedestrian place where the commitment to making things with one’s hands is the first step in getting the heads and the hearts of visitors into the action.

— David Pagel

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Oct. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

 Image: Robert Therrien, installation view. Credit: Gagosian Gallery

Art review: Monique Prieto, 'Time Enough' at ACME

“Time Enough,” Monique Prieto’s 12th solo show in Los Angeles, is nothing — and everything — like her previous exhibitions. It’s Prieto at her best, surprising viewers (myself included) who thought they knew what she was up to while pushing us out of our comfort zones and into a world of serious curiosity.

In the past, Prieto’s exhibitions have consisted of single bodies of work. At ACME, her wonderfully puzzling exhibition includes at least two, and maybe four, bodies of work.

On the east wall of the first gallery is a salon-style arrangement of eight oils on canvas. Ranging in size from 6 feet by 5 feet to 20 inches by 30 inches, these swiftly painted still lifes are a show unto themselves. Each treats pigment as if it were more valuable than tulip bulbs in 1637. The same goes for sophistication of palette, composition and text. Prieto handles all of these elements as if she had neither the time nor the luxury to make anything pretty.

All the right references are present in these slapdash pictures, including nods to Giorgio Morandi, Georges Braque, Francis Picabia, Marsden Hartley, Mary Heilmann and Lawrence Weiner. But Prieto evokes their trademark styles with such ham-fisted lumpiness you can’t help but think it’s wrongheaded. That’s part of the fun. Her playful paintings make you think for yourself.

In the second gallery, nine similarly sized and slightly larger paintings feature one-, two- and three-word phrases taken from Samuel Pepys' 17^th century autobiography. In most, candy-colored rays shine out from Prieto’s Flintstone-style words, cutting across the raw canvas like movie-premiere spotlights. These are the first works in which Prieto quotes herself. Like the ouroboros, it’s a form of self-cannibalization that is illogical yet generative, disquieting yet fertile.

The ink drawings in the third gallery add more loose ends to Prieto’s slippery exhibition. In three, six and 30 parts, they make it hard to distinguish between parts and wholes while suggesting that when it comes to art that’s alive, nothing sits still.

— David Pagel

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5942, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acmelosangeles.com

Images: Monique Prieto's "This Is True," 2011, top, and "Against Tomorrow," 2010, bottom. Credit for both: ACME

Art review: 'Gajin Fujita: Made in L.A.' at L.A. Louver

Andy Warhol is far better known for what he painted — soup cans and celebrities — than for how he did so — merging the hands-off cool of silk-screened prints with the hands-on heat of freely brushed paint. 

For the last 10 years, it's been the same for Gajin Fujita. Most folks have tended to see his dizzying collisions of 17^th century ukiyo-e imagery and 20^th century graffiti in terms of what they depict: dragons and maidens and tigers and ninja and goldfish, all caught up in whirlwinds that capture the anxiety of our times while staying true to Fujita’s roots as a first-generation Japanese American raised in Boyle Heights.

At L.A. Louver, “Gajin Fujita: Made in L.A.” looks back to Warhol by pushing his marriage of printmaking and painting further than ever. To treat Warhol as a formalist is pretty kinky, but that’s exactly what Fujita does in his powerfully democratic fusions of hand-painted passages, spray-painted tags and stencil-assisted patterns.

All of his paintings begin with a layer of gold, silver or platinum leaf, usually in a checkerboard pattern. All but the smallest wood panels then get tagged by guys from Fujita’s old crews, who use paint sticks and spray cans to leave marks in various styles and with various sentiments. Only then does Fujita go at it, using sketches and stencils to build his compositions, which evolve as each painting comes alive.

Different parts receive different treatments, touches, types of painterly application. Conflict does not disappear so much as it fuels the riotous visual energy. A Warholian sort of camouflaging takes shape: The faces and limbs of figures disappear in their garments and armor, which in turn get lost in the graffiti behind them.

In Fujita’s works, the stillness of icons meets the drama of face-to-face confrontation. Nearly all of his images feature two figures in some kind of struggle, hunt or battle. But the story told by the paint (and its diverse applications) is more complex, cosmopolitan, civilizing — a sort of stealth poetry that is nothing if not visual.

— David Pagel

L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com

 

Images: Gajin Fujita's "High Voltage," 2011, top, and "Rising Sun," 2011, bottom. Credit for both: L.A. Louver

Art review: John Altoon at the Box

 
 
The imagery in John Altoon’s 40 drawings at the Box is no more sophisticated than the stuff that often shows up on the walls of public restrooms: penises, vaginas and breasts, along with hastily scrawled figures who use body parts as if they were rudimentary tools.

But the way Altoon (1925-69) handles pens, crayons and brushes (both air and bristle-tipped) allows him to transform typically vulgar imagery into a humble love poem. Arranged in four rows on one wall, his 30-by-40-inch works, all made from 1966 to 1968, celebrate the pleasures of the flesh and the glories of knowing a good thing when you've got it.

The buxom babes and sleepy-eyed hunks in Altoon’s drawings are often accompanied by guileless frogs and sanguine monkeys. Disembodied genitals appear regularly, often behaving no differently than the humans and animals they interact with.

Amused contentment spills from every square inch of Altoon’s casually masterful compositions. Their riotous lines, blushes of color and whiffs of silliness soften the edges of what would otherwise be explicit, graphic, distasteful. Think of these hedonistic drawings as the long-lost relatives of Renoir’s late paintings, the pneumatic cluelessness of their figures replaced with the experiential wisdom of a down-to-earth libertine.

-- David Pagel

The Box, 977 Chung King Road, (213) 525-1747, through Oct. 22. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. www.theboxla.com.

Image: John Altoon, "Untitled." Credit: The Box